Cow-Tech Company Courts U.S. Farmers to Develop Export Opportunities
As it begins its pilot project in New Brunswick, SomaDetect has been validating the international demand for its product. The Fredericton AgTech company recently signed letters of intent with three-quarters of the 80 farmers it met with during a recent jaunt to Vermont.
Working with the Saint John sales-focused consultancy Momentum, SomaDetect CEO Bethany Deshpande made a four-day road trip to Vermont to assess the market for her product, which can quickly detect diseases in cows. Vermont is an interesting market for SomaDetect because it has 900 dairy farms, which is more than all of Atlantic Canada. What’s more, some of those farms are far bigger than what we have in Canada’s East Coast.
“A farm with 400 to 600 cows is a big farm in Atlantic Canada,” said Deshpande in a Thursday phone interview, which she conducted while monitoring a milking machine in New Brunswick. “But in Vermont, we met people with 5,000 cows and that’s a different market than what we have here.”
The trip validated Deshpande’s belief that SomaDetect can find a market beyond Atlantic Canada. In four days she met with 80 farmers and 60 of them signed letters of intent to buy the product once it’s on the market. That’s 6 percent of the state’s dairy industry, bagged in a four-day trip.
Read more about this story in Entrevestor.
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